There was a time when a photograph of a movie star was supposed to make the star look magnificent.
Hollywood had people for that.
During the studio era, publicity departments carefully shaped the public identities of their actors. Photographers controlled the lighting, publicists controlled access, and the resulting portraits presented celebrities as something slightly removed from ordinary humanity.
They weren't candid photographs pretending to capture real life. They were designed to manufacture glamour.
Then another kind of image became valuable: the famous person caught unprepared. An argument outside a restaurant, a relationship that wasn't yet public or simply an unflattering moment could reveal something the carefully constructed publicity portrait never would.
More importantly, the celebrity hadn't chosen it.
The entertainment industry discovered something uncomfortable:
The photograph a celebrity didn't want you to see could be worth more than the one they had carefully prepared.
Once that happened, celebrity was no longer confined to stages, screens and agreed appearances.
It could be pursued.
When Hollywood controlled the picture
The old Hollywood studio system didn't leave celebrity entirely to chance. Studios could exert enormous influence over how contracted actors were presented, from official photographs and biographies to the stories fed to newspapers and fan magazines.
The glamour portrait was part of that machinery.
Photographers such as George Hurrell used carefully controlled light and shadow to create images that looked almost architectural. The person in the photograph might have been real, but the star was being constructed.
There was still gossip, scandal and intrusive reporting, of course. Old Hollywood was hardly a sanctuary for personal privacy. But the major studios had considerable power to influence what reached the public and how their most valuable performers were presented.
Celebrity largely arrived through intermediaries.
That balance began to shift when photographers realised there was money in bypassing them.
Rome discovers the value of surprise
Post-war Rome became one of the places where modern paparazzi culture took recognisable form.
International film production brought major stars into the city, while Via Veneto became a particularly productive hunting ground for freelance photographers. The opportunity wasn't merely to photograph famous people. It was to catch them doing something their publicists hadn't arranged.
The economics encouraged increasingly aggressive behaviour.
TIME reported in 1961 that an ordinary celebrity photograph might earn an Italian photographer around $5, while a sufficiently dramatic image could bring as much as $500. A confrontation could therefore be much more profitable than a smile. Some photographers learned to provoke celebrities deliberately, then photograph the reaction they had helped create.
Federico Fellini had already captured this emerging culture in La Dolce Vita. One of the film's photographers was called Paparazzo, a name Fellini associated with an irritating insect that buzzed, hovered and stung. The fictional character ended up naming an international profession.
Behind the new word was a fundamental change in what audiences considered interesting.
The polished publicity portrait showed us the celebrity who had been prepared for public consumption. Paparazzi offered the tantalising possibility of seeing the person behind it.
That difference turned privacy into something with a market price.
The business of catching people unprepared
A candid photograph has one commercial advantage over an official portrait: scarcity.
There might be hundreds of perfectly usable photographs from a premiere, but the unexpected moment belongs to whoever captures it. If the moment reveals something previously unknown, its value rises further.
An industry developed around that scarcity. Photographers and agencies supplied publications, television programs and eventually websites whose own profits depended on attracting an audience.
It's tempting to tell this history as a battle between famous people and unpleasant men carrying telephoto lenses.
That's too convenient.
Aggressive photographers certainly crossed lines. People were followed, surrounded, shouted at and sometimes deliberately antagonised because anger made a better photograph than indifference.
But the photographer at the window wasn't creating the demand.
The audience was.
The industry could put a price on private moments because millions of people were willing to look at them.
That makes the moral relationship considerably less comfortable. The person buying a celebrity magazine wasn't chasing anybody through traffic, but their attention helped make the chase profitable.
When pursuit stopped being a metaphor
Diana, Princess of Wales, occupied an extraordinary position inside this system.
She understood the power of photography and could use media attention skilfully. Images helped create the unusually direct relationship she had with the public.
But being exceptionally valuable to photographers also meant that ordinary movement could become difficult. Where Diana went, photographers followed. Changes in her private relationships could alter the value of an image overnight.
The camera was no longer waiting at the destination.
It was following the car.
That distinction became impossible to ignore after 31 August 1997, when Diana and Dodi Fayed died following the crash of their Mercedes in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris while paparazzi vehicles were following them.
The years afterward produced conspiracy theories and competing accounts, so the official finding matters. In 2008, a British inquest jury concluded that Diana and Fayed had been unlawfully killed through the grossly negligent driving of chauffeur Henri Paul and the driving of the following vehicles. Paul's alcohol impairment and the occupants' failure to wear seatbelts were also contributing factors.
It would be simplistic to reduce Diana's death to “the paparazzi killed her.”
But it would be equally difficult to look at what happened and pretend the culture of pursuit was irrelevant.
For a moment, the public was confronted not merely with the photographs it had been consuming, but with the machinery required to obtain them.
There was widespread outrage.
The appetite survived it.
The pursuit becomes an economy
By the 2000s, digital photography and online publishing had made celebrity imagery faster to produce and distribute. At the same time, celebrity magazines, entertainment television and gossip websites were competing for a constant stream of material.
Britney Spears became one of the starkest examples of what happened when enormous public interest collided with that machinery.
During 2007 and early 2008, photographers followed her relentlessly while her personal difficulties were unfolding in public. The intensity can look inexplicable until the economics are considered.
X17 founder François Navarre told CBS that an exclusive Spears photograph could sell for about $10,000 in the United States and continue generating licensing revenue elsewhere. Exceptional exclusives could ultimately be worth more than $100,000.
Suddenly the crowd of photographers becomes easier to understand.
Not more defensible.
Just more understandable.
A single photograph could support photographers, agencies, magazines, websites and television coverage because the same image could generate attention repeatedly throughout the media chain.
Spears wasn't merely being followed by people obsessed with Britney Spears.
She was being followed by a market.
And at the far end of that market sat an enormous audience wanting to know what happened next.
Then celebrities acquired the printing press
The next disruption didn't come from privacy law or from the disappearance of public curiosity.
It came from technology.
Social media gave celebrities something they had never possessed at this scale: direct access to their audience.
A musician no longer needed a magazine to publish a photograph from home. An actor could announce a relationship or show a holiday without negotiating access with a publication. Millions of people could receive the image directly from the person depicted in it.
The effect wasn't necessarily greater privacy. Many celebrities began sharing far more of their lives than an old Hollywood publicity department would ever have contemplated.
What changed was control.
The famous person could increasingly decide what to reveal, when to reveal it and how it should look.
That mattered economically as well. Paparazzi interviewed by The Guardian in 2022 described a business squeezed partly by social media. Publications now had an enormous supply of free celebrity imagery, while an unwanted paparazzi photograph could sometimes be commercially weakened simply by the celebrity publishing a better image themselves.
The exclusive photograph had lost some of its scarcity.
For a strange moment, celebrity imagery had travelled almost full circle. Hollywood once controlled the star's image through studios and publicists. Paparazzi broke through that control by capturing what wasn't authorised. Social media gave famous people the ability to become their own publishers.
But it didn't take us back to old Hollywood.Something much stranger had happened.
The camera moved into the audience
Professional paparazzi still exist, and rare candid photographs can still be valuable.
What has changed is their monopoly on catching famous people unprepared.
A celebrity doesn't need to encounter a professional photographer anymore. There may be a phone at the next restaurant table, on the opposite pavement or in the hands of somebody who happens to recognise them at an airport.
And unlike an old film camera, that phone is connected to a global publishing network.
The distance between witnessing something and broadcasting it has collapsed.
So the paparazzo has partly disappeared into the audience.
The implications go beyond celebrity photography.
The same audience that once financed the market by buying magazines can now supply material to it. A private moment can become public without a photographer, agency or newspaper ever being involved.
In some ways that is more democratic. Famous people are no longer entirely dependent on media organisations to communicate with the public.
In other ways it is considerably more invasive.
There used to be a recognisable person with a long lens standing outside the restaurant.
Now the camera could belong to anybody.
This creates a peculiar bargain for modern celebrity.
Social media gives public figures extraordinary control over their own presentation. They can speak directly to audiences, challenge reporting, release their own images and build businesses around their identities without traditional media acting as gatekeeper.
At the same time, visibility has become commercially valuable in itself.
The technology that lets a celebrity control exposure also rewards constant exposure.
That tension can't be resolved simply by saying that famous people chose to be famous. A person can benefit from public attention without surrendering every private moment. But technology has made that boundary extraordinarily difficult to enforce.
The modern celebrity therefore has more control over their public image than many predecessors did, while living in an environment where almost anyone nearby can create an uncontrolled one.
That's not the end of paparazzi culture.
It's its decentralisation.